Devised and Ensemble

Cory Hinkle writes about Western Society from the British-German collective Gob Squad, and its multi-media, audience-involving production that investiages wish fulfillment, starting with the recreation of "one of the least watched videos on the Internet".

There are a variety of ways people can stay connected. Each year we all step back and assess where we are with our lives, and who needs what. We want people to step in towards the heart of things when that seems right, and step back when they need to grow in a different way. There is a dynamic quality to it, but also a sense of stability—that's the trick.

Our process is open-source, inquiry-based and ever-evolving. We love hyphens. We flirt at the intersection of playmaking and script writing. We believe that theater requires the whole performer—mind, body, and voice. Often we draw strong, immediate connections that open up a dialogue between past and present, and play on themes of history, science, mathematics, and social justice.

Beau Jest in Boston is thirty years old. Over that time we have seen several transformations, but the impulse that brought us together has never changed. We are actor-driven. We only do projects we are personally invested in pursuing as a group. We like work that is physically inventive and imaginatively staged. We like to take our time developing a piece, and will spend anywhere from two months to two years on it. We use Beau Jest as a laboratory to explore new ways of combining gesture, text, and physicality.

In this, Strange Attractor’s first major process, we put our commitment to the test, and through that difficult process, we became an ensemble. We still worked without a director, but unlike our first casual process, now we cared about the outcome. We’d fundraised for airline tickets and stipends and gotten our communities excited about our company. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to make something—we wanted it to be good.

We’ve found most artists we come in contact with in Detroit aren’t bound to a single discipline—printmakers curate community food-based events, and trained painters build large-scale public installations. This inherent openness to working cross-disciplinarily has helped us to expand our ideas about the work of our company and the nature of our ensemble.

Offering insight into the relationship between ensembles and universities, Michael Rohd shares the text of a talk he gave at the Network of Ensemble Theaters.

With no assistance from outside their group, several student performance groups devise their own work as a solution to the posted problem. The problem is a mix of text and images arranged on a page. The text and graphic elements are precise, and often not obviously meaningful beyond their ordinary appearance, but after a close read the details of the page may be seen as suggestive toward a response, provocation, or a call for investigation. This is what students must solve through performance.

Over the past seven years, the Post Natyam Collective’s creative practice has transitioned from in-person collaboration to web-based collaboration. Often our process is deeply informed by scholarly engagement, including feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern histories of Indian classical dance forms. Collective members often develop promising seeds from our shared processes into diverse products: dance-for-camera pieces, art installations, lecture-demonstrations, performance works, and scholarly papers.

What we really needed—and received—was a place to develop an unfinished work in a professional touring locale with Chicago audiences, and to prototype a student chorus that would be trained to perform in the work. Simultaneously Columbia College had the Double Edge ensemble embedded in its department for nearly a month. Acting students had daily access to training. Directors, playwrights, and actors could observe rehearsal and process regularly.

The rise of artistic multi-functionalism, and the open, assimilative, and collaborative values it implies, has coincided with the emergence of devising as a major theatrical discipline. Although devising is hardly new the process of developing work through collaboration among a group of artists has gained traction in recent years. It makes sense: both multi-functionalism and devising are solutions to an economic downturn, ways to continue creating complex and multivalent art in a scale-back climate.

In this installment, Mike Lew discusses the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the fraught practice of yellow face, and what equity for people of color actually looks like.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about Generation Sex, a devised piece from Teatro Luna looking at misogyny, violence, Latina identities, modern femininity, and more.

Chris Garza reviews Theatre Unbound’s Silkworms (a nun play) and takes a look into the director Isabel Nelson's devising process.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about the Chicago-based Albany Park Theatre Project, a youth theatre ensemble. She reviews APTP's 2014 remounted production of God's Work, at the Goodman Theatre.

Jonathan Mandell overviews five eclectic works by Texas playwright Kirk Lynn.

This week's conversation topic is "Dramaturgical Collaborations in Devised Work" and will be moderated by @ArtsEmerson—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, April 17 on hashtag #newplay at 10am PDT (Vancouver) / 12pm CDT (Austin) / 1pm EDT (New York) / 17:00 GMT / 6pm BST (London). On Thursday, get heard in the conversation by searching for #newplay in Twitter (sort by “all”) and by putting “#newplay” somewhere in your messages. Spread the word!

Bess Rowen interviews Christopher Andrew Loar of the New York Neo-Futurists, creator/director of The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill.